The sound of tapping keyboards filled Fort Stanton’s admin office. Private Liana Morales, unnoticed by her peers, typed commands into the base’s network quietly.

“Clerk, stop fiddling with that,” a tech sergeant barked.

Liana ignored him. Within minutes, she had rerouted drone surveillance, flagged threats, and detected an insider planning sabotage.

The twist? Liana had been sent undercover as a clerk to expose corruption within the tech team, and her calm demeanor had everyone fooled — until the sabotage was stopped.

****************

Fort Stanton’s administrative building smelled of burnt coffee and overheated printers. Rows of cubicles stretched under flickering fluorescent tubes, each occupied by a specialist or sergeant pretending to work while scrolling fantasy football scores. The only steady sound was the soft, relentless clack of keyboards.

In the far corner, Private Liana Morales sat at the lowest desk in the room, the one with the broken wheel on the chair. Her uniform was one size too big, sleeves rolled twice, name tape slightly crooked. To everyone else she was the new clerk who still asked where the supply forms lived. She kept her eyes down, shoulders rounded, the picture of harmless incompetence.

Her fingers moved faster than anyone noticed.

On her screen, a mundane Excel spreadsheet hid a nested terminal window. Lines of green text scrolled upward as she ghosted through the base’s drone-control subnet. No one saw the second monitor she’d angled away from the aisle, the one currently painting a live thermal map of the perimeter.

“Morales!” Tech Sergeant Doyle barked from three cubicles over. “Stop fiddling and get me the leave roster for Bravo Company before I come over there myself.”

Liana didn’t look up. “Yes, Sergeant,” she answered in the small, apologetic voice she’d practiced for six weeks.

Doyle grunted and turned back to his phone.

Thirty more seconds. That was all she needed.

She typed the final command. The drone swarm on runway three, supposedly running routine calibration, executed a silent barrel roll and realigned their cameras toward hangar seven. A new overlay appeared: heat signatures. Four figures in maintenance coveralls moving crates that were far too heavy for spare parts.

Liana allowed herself one slow breath.

Two months earlier, CID had pulled her from Fort Huachuca with a single photograph: a pallet of shoulder-fired missiles that had vanished between Kandahar and Qatar, later surfacing in the hands of a militia the U.S. was technically still arming. The trail ended here, at Stanton’s drone logistics squadron. Someone inside was selling next-generation guidance chips to the highest bidder. The someone had to be in this very office; only they could scrub the flight logs and forge the maintenance signatures.

So they sent Liana, twenty-three years old, fresh-faced, quiet. Perfect camouflage.

She pressed ENTER.

Across the room, every monitor flashed red at once. Klaxons howled in the corridor. The secure door slammed shut with a pneumatic hiss that made half the office jump out of their seats.

Doyle spun around. “What the hell did you do, Morales?”

Liana finally raised her head. The timid clerk was gone. Her posture was straight, voice calm, almost gentle.

“I didn’t do anything, Sergeant Doyle. You did.”

She rotated her second monitor so the room could see.

Live feed: Doyle’s own account, timestamped over the past eight weeks, transferring restricted encryption keys to an offshore server. Another window showed tonight’s scheduled handoff: hangar seven, 0230, $1.4 million wired to a bank in Cyprus.

Doyle went very still.

The main door burst open. Four MPs in full kit stormed in, rifles leveled. The lead sergeant’s eyes found Liana immediately.

“Private Morales?”

She stood, unhurried, and produced a black CID badge from the pocket nobody had ever thought to check.

“Special Agent Morales, actually. Sergeant Doyle, you’re under arrest for violations of the Espionage Act, Article 104a, Uniform Code of Military Justice. Turn around.”

Doyle’s face cycled through white, red, and a sickly gray. “You’re a private. You file DD 1610s. You—”

“I file whatever keeps me invisible,” she said, stepping aside so the MPs could cuff him. “Tonight I filed you.”

The office was frozen. Specialists who had spent weeks rolling their eyes at the clumsy new clerk now stared as if she’d grown a second head.

Liana addressed them without raising her voice. “For future reference, when someone volunteers to take every graveyard shift and never complains, ask why.”

One of the younger airmen found the courage to speak. “How… how long?”

“Since the day I ‘accidentally’ spilled coffee on the server rack and spent four hours alone in the comms closet drying it with a hairdryer.” She gave a small, polite smile. “Hairdryers are surprisingly useful.”

The MPs hauled Doyle away. His pleas echoed down the hallway and then cut off behind the security door.

Liana gathered her notebook—the one filled margin-to-margin with perfect forgeries of motor-pool signatures—and slipped it into an evidence envelope. She paused at the threshold, looking back at the stunned office.

“Coffee’s fresh, by the way,” she said. “Try not to sell it to terrorists.”

Then she was gone, footsteps light, already rehearsing the timid shrug she’d need for the next cover.